Sabre announces total travel solution enabling agencies

17 June 2010

Sabre Travel Network, the leading provider of high performance solutions for the travel industry, today announced the global launch of Sabre Red, an innovative total travel solution designed to help travel agencies drive customer loyalty and power business performance, resulting in increased revenues, improved efficiency and reduced costs.
Unveiled at a Sabre-hosted event in Austria on Tuesday, Sabre Red features a range of powerful new capabilities that span the entire spectrum of an agency’s business from shopping and booking travel, to serving customers throughout their trip, to using business intelligence for insight and continuous improvement.

“To succeed in today’s highly competitive market where travel is more complex and travellers face more choices than ever, travel companies face the challenge of balancing resources to deliver great customer service with the need to meet profitability goals,” said Greg Webb, President of Sabre Travel Network. “Sabre Red helps agencies enjoy the best of both worlds, creating and maintaining high customer loyalty, while also growing revenue and keeping costs in check.”

Using Sabre Red, agencies will be able to respond nimbly to the emergence of airline ancillary fees and other merchandising initiatives, the growth in demand for mobile services, changes in preferred supplier agreements, the challenge of finding agents with GDS format knowledge, and ultimately to meet the needs of more informed and demanding travellers.

Driving innovation – a platform made for speed and stability

At the heart of Sabre Red is the Sabre Red Workspace, built on a future-ready, open platform that provides users with faster start-up times, greater stability, high performance even in low bandwidth areas, and superior application integration capabilities. Using the Red Workspace, agents will access a new graphically-rich environment and utilise a growing list of capabilities delivered as Sabre Red Apps that seamlessly ‘plug’ into the Workspace. The flexibility of the Red Workspace will also enable agencies to integrate their own applications, providing a customised agent workflow tailored to their operational needs.

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Other new capabilities announced as part of Sabre Red include:

Drive Customer Loyalty

* Shop by Total Price – shop and book travel by total price including applicable ancillary fees, enabling agencies to stay ahead of the merchandising trend
* Web and Mobile Traveller Self-Services – building on Sabre’s leadership in mobile traveller services, new web and mobile self-service capabilities enable travellers to purchase and manage ancillary services, upgrade registration, check-in and more
* Mobile Traveller Messaging Service – automated service enabling agencies to provide information to travellers at specific time and location points, e.g. pre-trip notifications (weather, ready for check-in, gates, delays); in-trip messaging (baggage carousel, delays); and arrival messaging (welcome home, solicit feedback)
* Multi-Source enabled - XML connectivity provides new air and hotel content and capabilities, and enables integration of air and hotel merchandising initiatives in a graphical workflow

Power Business Performance

§ Preferred Supplier Optimisation – increase preferred supplier sales by up to 20% using a combination of business intelligence and a sophisticated rules engine to manage offline and online displays

§ Post-Booking Automation – save up to 10-20 minutes per transaction using automated exchanges (launching in twenty additional countries); and minimize potential for human error with process automation solutions that can enable over 90 percent touchless ticketing rates and 90 to 100 percent quality control compliance

* Graphical Workflow– a fully graphical workflow to manage customer profiles, shop and book air and hotel, handle ticket exchanges and much more, helping to reduce agent training time and keystrokes by up to 50%
* Multi-GDS capable – enables agencies who serve clients on more than one GDS to simplify their operations with standardised workflow across their customer base

“Customers are already using our Sabre Red Workspace – in fact we’ve spent the past six months pilot testing with more than 250 customers around the world and plan to upgrade all our customers onto the new Red Workspace in the coming months,” said Webb.

“Sabre Red is the result of extensive market research, usability testing, and customer input throughout the design and development process to bring something unique, compelling and innovative to market that genuinely meets the needs of agencies today, tomorrow and in the future. Customers want something they can touch and feel today and that’s what we’re delivering, with more great capabilities being rolled out throughout 2010 and into 2011,” he said.

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